Until recently, it was unusual for people to have more than one telephone number at which they could be contacted. People generally could only be reached at home: with limited exceptions people were not accessible at work.
In the last few decades, this fact has changed. People have become more reachable at work. Facsimile machines have made possible the electronic transfer of written communications. Pagers, and later cellular and satellite telephones, have allowed people to receive communications even when not within reach of a land-line telephone. With the increased popularity of the Internet, more and more people are installing multiple telephone lines to their homes. And people are becoming increasingly mobile, having more than one office at which they work (and hence, multiple work telephones).
But with each of these new forms of communication, a new telephone number is required. Finding the right number to call has become a more complicated proposition. This is especially true of home, work, and cellular/satellite telephones, where there can be multiple different ways to reach a person, but not all telephone numbers will work at any given time.
If a telephone call is placed to one of a person's telephone numbers, if the person is not currently accessible at that telephone number, the caller must try another of the callee's telephone numbers. If the callee is not at the second telephone number, the caller must try a third telephone number, and then a fourth, and so on. Eventually, either the caller will reach the callee or will give up. The process is totally outside the callee's control and is totally dependent on the caller's luck in selecting a telephone number at which the callee can be reached.
This problem is exacerbated when the callee knows he will not be available. Unless there is a mechanism for the callee to route calls to someone who can take a message (for example, an assistant or voicemail), the call will never reach the callee. And even when such mechanisms are available for forwarding calls, they have limited capabilities. The mechanisms can only forward calls to a single destination, providing no flexibility for the possibility that the forwarded destination may be unable to take the call.
The present invention addresses these and other problems associated with the prior art.